There will not be another Ted Sylvester among us soon. Sylvester, a hall of fame reporter who covered the Rockland area like a blanket for decades, passed away Saturday morning at 83. He was a good and decent man.
Sylvester was a linotype operator at Rockland’s Courier Gazette who wanted something more. In those days the Courier shared waterfront offices with the Bangor Daily News. BDN bureau chief Leo Chabot hired Sylvester to cover bowling leagues. That was it for the linotype machine, even if reporting paid much less. In 1967, he packed up his family and moved to Presque Isle to work under Dean Rhodes, another legend. In 1971, Chabot moved on and Sylvester returned to Rockland as BDN bureau chief. Thank God, he hired me for minimum wage plus mileage when he set up shop in Rockland.
For more than 20 years, Sylvester covered the news from district court to Congress and there was never enough. He would routinely file a (perfectly written) report on the Rockland City Council well after 10 p.m. to beat the Portland Press Herald and the Courier. The coverage was so overwhelming that the PPH was driven out of town. He loved beating the young guys at the PPH, but said that beating the Courier “was like kissing your sister.”
He never took a class in journalism. He taught them, six editions a week.
A Courier graduate who now works for the BDN, Steve Betts, said, “Ted was one of the true journalists. When I first moved to Rockland in 1981, I was in awe of the job he did.” A former Camden Herald reporter, Sharon Goodspeed, said, “He was a lovely man, one you could call a reporter and mean it as a compliment.” An often vanquished foe, Larry Ouellette of the PPH, said, “Ted was an honorable man who brought grace and dignity to the profession of journalism and the unsung calling of the local news beat.” In those pre-computer days, the daily newspaper was considered indispensable.
Sylvester started his day at the Ye Olde Coffee Shop, holding fort at the rear table. He knew everyone at that table, their wives, their children and their dogs. Over his coffee, he would collect the day’s news before the other newspaper offices even opened. He would write the leads on table napkins and give half of them to me when he returned. Those were the days when we had two complete pages to fill. We filled them. We started on typewriters, handing the articles to Betty Hallowell, who sent them to Bangor. We progressed to tape machines, which were an improvement, but you had better not let your snowy boots anywhere near that tape. Finally we got computers, which Sylvester solved immediately. They warned me that I could erase the whole newspaper file if I did the wrong thing, so I feared them for years.
In his Maine Press Association Hall of Fame induction, I wrote, “Sylvester worked the small town news beat to perfection, covering everything from city council meetings to fires and shootings, murder and mayhem that was all too common in 1970s Rockland.” If there was a town meeting, zoning board or selectmen’s meeting, there was a good chance we were there, notebook in hand.
Sylvester knew all about the Maine State Prison from brother Harlan Sylvester, who worked there for decades. During a prison riot and murder in 1975, inmates took guards as hostages and demanded to see a reporter to air their grievances. Sylvester was plucked from covering a state soccer championship game by the state police and taken to the prison at breakneck speeds. He found a guard with a knife to his throat. The guards said if the inmates came toward Sylvester, he was to dive on the floor so they could fire their shotguns.
After an interview and photographs, most reporters would have run like hell. Sylvester asked the inmates what would happen now. “They will beat the hell out of us,” the inmates said. Sylvester offered to walk them back to their cells. When people praised him for his cool under fire, Sylvester always dismissed the incident as part of the job.
A feature of the Saturday BDN in the midcoast area was “Fish n’ Chips,” Sylvester’s column. He never used the column to boost his own importance but shared the foibles of the human condition. The column I remember, for some reason, was when he mistakenly used cement instead of fertilizer on his rose bushes at his Owls Head home. For some reason, those roses grew better than any others, he said.
In his last column, Sylvester said, “I have had the opportunity to fly with the Air Force, go to sea with the Coast Guard, ride the roads with police and travel to Washington where the politicians hang out. I’ve had the opportunity to interview governors, senators, members of Congress and vice president candidates. On the other side of the coin, I have interviewed murderers and thieves.”
As bureau chief he hired so many “Micks” like me, Walter Griffin, Michael McGuire and Susan Collins (not the senator) that we named him as an honorary Irishman. We always let him buy drinks on St. Patrick’s Day.
Griffin and I talked many times of visiting Ted in his Owls Head home, just to catch up. Now, both Griffin and Sylvester are gone. It’s too late.
We will never see the blanket local news coverage and the like of Ted Sylvester again. And that is a sad thing.
Emmet Meara lives in Camden in blissful retirement after working as a reporter for the BDN in Rockland for 30 years.